Cossack Tales

Gogol (1809-52) was a Russian writer of Ukrainian origin. Whilst his contemporaries viewed him as one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in his work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of surrealism and the grotesque. His early works were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing but his later work satirised political corruption in the Russian Empire. The two stories published together in English translation in this edition are The Night of Christmas Eve (1832), a series of comic scenes taken from the life of Ukrainian peasants, and Tarass Boolba (1835), a romanticised though historically accurate depiction of the life of an old Zaporozhian Cossack and his two sons at the beginning of the religious wars with Poland.